How Language Shapes the Way We Think Languages differ from one another. The differences influence the way we think. Lang

How Language Shapes the Way We Think
    Good morning, everyone. In today’s lecture, we will talk about how languages differ from one another, and more importantly, how these differences influence the way we think. Now of course, there isn’t just one language in the world, there are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world. And all the languages differ from one another. Some languages have different sounds, they have different vocabularies, and they also have different structures. That begs the question: Does the language we speak shape the way we think? Recently, we’ve started doing research, and now we have actual scientific data to weigh in on this question.
    So, first, color. Languages differ in how they divide up the color spectrum—the visual world. Some languages have lots of words for colors; some have only a couple words, "light" and "dark." For example, in English, there’s a word for blue, but in Russian, there isn’t a single word. Instead, Russian speakers have to differentiate between light blue, "goluboy," and dark blue, "siniy." So Russians have this lifetime of experience of, in language, distinguishing these two colors.
    When we test people’s ability to perceptually discriminate these colors, we find Russian speakers are faster across this linguistic boundary. They’re faster to be able to tell the difference between a light and dark blue. And when you look at people’s brains as they’re looking at colors—say you have colors shifting slowly from light to dark blue—the brains of people who use different words for light and dark blue will give a surprised reaction as the colors shift from light to dark, as if, "Oh, something has categorically changed." What about English speakers, for example? Well, they don’t make this categorical distinction, they don’t give that surprise, because nothing is categorically changing.
    Now let’s move to our second part—gender. Lots of languages have grammatical gender, every noun gets assigned a gender, often masculine or feminine. And these genders differ across languages. So, for example, the sun is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish, and the moon, the reverse. Could this actually have any consequence for how people think? Actually, it turns out that’s the case. If you ask German and Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge—"bridge" happens to be grammatically feminine in German, grammatically masculine in Spanish—German speakers are more likely to say bridges are "beautiful," "elegant" and stereotypically feminine words. Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they’re "strong" or "long," these masculine words.
    Our third part is about events. That is, languages differ in how they describe events. In English, it’s fine to say, "He broke the vase." But in a language like Spanish, you might be more likely to say, "The vase broke," or, "The vase broke itself."
    So, people who speak different languages will pay attention to different things, depending on what their language usually requires them to do. So we show the same accident to English speakers and Spanish speakers, English speakers will remember who did it, because English requires you to say, "He did it; he broke the vase." Whereas Spanish speakers tend to remember that it was an accident. They’re more likely to remember the intention. So, two people watch the same event, witness the same crime, but end up remembering different things about that event. This has implications for eyewitness testimony. It also has implications for blame and punishment. So if you take English speakers and I just show someone breaking a vase, and I say, "He broke the vase," as opposed to "The vase broke," you will blame someone more. The language guides our reasoning about events.
    To sum up today, we have talked about three ways that our minds are influenced by the languages we speak. Next time, I would talk about my working experience with people using different languages.